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Accordingly, it is just as common to look for membranes where there are none. We trace our fingers over the faces or bodies of people we love as if we wish we could leave unspoken thoughts and feelings behind like residue. We place our foreheads together and press gently, as if to see whether we can merge that way. We struggle toward each other out of our little meat suits.
pulling on a string from earlier in the essay, when a friend uses that expression
Keeler, California, is so far way that when you scan the radio for a station, it dials through empty airwaves until it comes all the way around to your original blank frequency, and goes again. I was driving south to north through the center of the state on the hunt for someplace remote and dry, extreme, unlike any of the landscapes familiar to me. I was following the grand American tradition of running westward from my problems. [...]
love this opening sentence
[...] Minnie is actually the fourth Minnie Dora Bunn; the original Minnie Dora Bunn was one of the charter members, and she and every subsequent Minnie Dora Bunn have served as Society president in their turn. The Minnie I spoke to, let's call her MDB4, recently gave birth to her first child, a girl, whose name surprised no one. [...]
lol
I once had a disagreement with a boyfriend about the details of this process. The dispute was more semantic than factual. He described organisms like Pando this way: aspen trees "share their roots" they reach out underground and clasp onto one another as if holding hands. They survive collaboratively. I insisted that the trees weren't holding hands. They were the same tree at root, shooting up many varied expressions of itself, a triumphant single organism. He saw a collective and I saw an individual - which, he observed pointedly, seemed like a pretty decent metaphor for some more critical differences in our dispositions. I rolled my eyes.
[...] Americans' unwillingness to prioritize how we deal with the dead (or our supposition that the story, or the parts of it that matter, stop with the heartbeat) may constitute a failure of moral imagination, but it absolutely fails to imagine the way the living and the dead remain connected, no matter how the living feel about it. The dead tell us how we're dying, how we're living, who among us gets a better shot than others at a whole and healthy life, and how we remain vulnerable to one another and to the vicissitudes of an unpredictable world. Our epidemics, the commonality of our despair, our continual mistakes, the progress we have yet to make, the wrongs we have yet to correct - all these are mirrored back to us by the dead. No one likes to be reminded of these things, but they don't go away just because the bodies do.
[...] An old man walked by and, seeing the look on our faces, cried, "AH! AMOR!" Later, you took me to the Mojave Desert, full of ocotillo and sage, where the dunes migrate in the wind and sunrises are a purple that is also orange, and hiked me to the highest spine of hte tallest dune.
it's weird but i can really see this picture: the old man walking by, sun behind them, the girl on the bench smiling wryly with a suppressed earnestness
For the last twenty years, at Syracuse University, I’ve been teaching a class in the nineteenth-century Russian short story in translation. My students are some of the best young writers in America. (We pick six new students a year from an applicant pool of between six and seven hundred.) They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space”—the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves—their strengths, weaknesses, obsessions, peculiarities, the whole deal. At this level, good writing is assumed; the goal is to help them acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves.
I was an engineering student in college, at the Colorado School of Mines, and came to fiction late, with a particular understanding of fiction’s purpose. I’d had a powerful experience one summer, reading The Grapes of Wrath at night, in an old RV in my parents’ driveway in Amarillo, after long days working in the oil fields as what was called a “jug hustler.” My fellow workers included a Vietnam vet who, there in the middle of the prairie, periodically burst into the voice of an amped-up radio host (“THIS IS WVOR, AMARILLO!”) and an ex-con, just out of jail, who, every morning, in the van on the way to the ranch where we were working, would update me on the new and perverse things he and his “lady” had tried sexually the night before, images that have stayed with me ever since, sadly.
As I read Steinbeck after such a day, the novel came alive. I was working in a continuation of the fictive world, I saw. It was the same America, decades later. I was tired, Tom Joad was tired. I felt misused by some large and wealthy force, and so did Reverend Casy. The capitalist behemoth was crushing me and my new pals beneath it, just as it had crushed the Okies who’d driven through this same Panhandle in the 1930s on their way to California. We too were the malformed detritus of capitalism, the necessary cost of doing business. In short, Steinbeck was writing about life as I was finding it. He’d arrived at the same questions I was arriving at, and he felt they were urgent, as they were coming to feel urgent to me.
The Russians, when I found them a few years later, worked on me in the same way. They seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.
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Look away from the page and summarize for me what you know so far. Try to do it in one or two sentences.
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What are you curious about?
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Where do you think the story is headed?
Whatever you answered, that’s what Chekhov now has to work with. He has, already, with this first page, caused certain expectations and questions to arise. You’ll feel the rest of the story to be meaningful and coherent to the extent that it responds to these (or “takes them into account” or “exploits them”).
In the first pulse of a story, the writer is like a juggler, throwing bowling pins into the air. The rest of the story is the catching of those pins. At any point in the story, certain pins are up there and we can feel them. We’d better feel them. If not, the story has nothing out of which to make its meaning.
We might say that what’s happened over the course of this page is that the path the story is on has narrowed. The possibilities were infinite before you read it (it could have been about anything) but now it has become, slightly, “about” something.
Here, Chekhov gives us an opportunity to reconsider the scary term “structure.”
We might think of structure as simply: an organizational scheme that allows the story to answer a question it has caused its reader to ask.
Me, at the end of the first page: “Poor Marya. I already sort of care about her. How did she get here?”
Story, in the first paragraph of its second page: “Well, she had some bad luck.”
We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question.